


The Rift

by penumbria



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Gen, M/M, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-05
Updated: 2018-11-05
Packaged: 2019-08-18 20:50:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,929
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16524401
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/penumbria/pseuds/penumbria
Summary: Take a mysterious rift in space emitting deadly radiation. Add a John Sheppard suicide run to close it plus Rodney's big brain. Add a dash of their combined luck. And a little bit of meddling, maybe. Shake well. Oops.





	The Rift

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for the 2018 SGA Reverse Bang. It was inspired by the art of rainy_outthere.  
> Thanks to my beta Kaj.   
> I do not own Stargate and make no money from this.  
> The art is in the story and I will add a link if/when I get one.

 

 

“Faster, John, faster, must go faster, must go faster!”

“I’m pushing her to the max, Rodney! It’s a puddle jumper, not a warship. It doesn’t have a hyperdrive even if it does have a ZPM on board.”

“Of course it doesn’t and even if it did you couldn’t engage it in this rift space. It would destabilize the rift and all of hyperspace as well and that’s the last thing we need.”

“I was being facetious, McKay.”

“Right, okay, well, regardless, the rift is collapsing at a faster rate than when we entered and set off the device. If the other end doesn’t appear soon, we’ll get caught in the collapse. Best case scenario, it could kill us.”

“Killing us is best case?”

“Yes. Worst case could be like getting caught forever in an event horizon, aware but unable to do anything. Or being horribly mutated but living in an alternate slice of subspace. Or breaking into our component atoms but aware, sort of ascended but not able to leave the rift space. Or-“

“Okay. Fine. Dying is best case.”

“Dying is the best case scenario if we’re caught in the collapse behind us, which is now less than ten meters behind the jumper. It was over seventy when we set off the device to start the collapse. Best case overall means coming out of rift space by reaching the exit.”

“Well, good. We’ll keep aiming for that.”

“Now just over eight meters and closing.”

“Don’t need the countdown to best case scenario death, Rodney.”

“Just trying to motivate you and your supergene and brain, Colonel. Six meters.”

“Consider me properly motivated.”

“If we make it through this and get back to Atlantis, you may get that promotion to General. That’s the next one, right? Full colonel, then general? That’s how they did it with O’Neill, anyway. Four and a half meters.”

“Yes, as you know perfectly well, Rodney. You’ve worked with the military since you were a teenager. Don’t play dumb about it. Counting down is keeping you calm somehow, isn’t it?”

“Yes. It is. I am focusing on my job. Two meters. In this scenario, that means pulling miracles out of my ass. One and a half meters. I’ve transferred all power to the engines, except the absolute necessity of the shield which is keeping the jumper intact while in the spacial pressures of the rift and the inertial dampeners which are keeping us from being smears on the wall at these speeds. Holding at one and a half meters out.”

“I increased speed as much as possible. Wait, you didn’t mention life support!”

“If the rift collapse catches us, who cares about life support? Frankly, I would rather be already dead when that happens.”

“If!  _ If _ it happens. Don’t lose faith in me now, McKay!”

“Fine, _ if _ the jumper is caught by the rift collapse I would rather it catch my already dead body than my live self to possibly not kill. Then the best case is already achieved and worst cases can’t happen. One point three meters.”

“Okay, so how long until we are out of air and suffocate, then? How long do I have to get us out of here or far enough ahead for you to turn the oxygen back on?”

“At the current rate of usage and the current rate of speed of the jumper and the rift collapse, it won’t matter. One meter. I hoped the extra power would give us enough engine power to get ahead but the collapse rate is increasing too fast for even our -“

“Hah!”

The puddle jumper exited the rift and entered normal space. “Did the rift fully collapse?”

Rodney checked his readings. “Yes. It’s gone. Completely.”

John nodded. “Good. So we completed the mission  _ and  _ didn’t die. Win! Where did the rift dump us? Are we still in Pegasus? The Milky Way? Um, the Asgard galaxy, uh, Othala? Or please tell me we didn’t drop out into the Ori galaxy! That would be worst case scenario.”

Rodney shook his head. “No. We’re in Pegasus. I told you the rift was designed to focus on Atlantis specifically. It was locked on the city. That’s why we couldn’t leave the planet in her without it following. Though since Merlin’s device took out the ascended Ori and SG-1 set off the Ark thing and that ascended who was helping them is keeping Adria busy, the Ori galaxy wouldn’t be so horrible.”

“So, then we’re home? We’re in Atlantis’ system? Why haven’t they hailed us? Or did we hop dimensions again, McKay?”

Rodney looked at his tablet. “No. Our readings match the universal frequency of this universe. But, bring up the readings of the solar system on the HUD.”

The screen showed a familiar system. John gaped.  “We’re in Atlantis’  _ original  _ system? The one we left when the Replicators attacked? Where your whale friend Sam is?”

Rodney nodded slowly before zooming the image on one spot. “Yes, yes, that one, but do you recognize that?”

John tilted his head and frowned. “That’s the ancient weapons platform that you and Peter Grodin went to repair before the first Wraith Siege before Earth people showed up. The one that killed Grodin when the Wraith blew it up when the shields failed. That - isn’t a good sight to see. Exactly how far back did we go, McKay?”

“I’m checking stellar drift calculations. Give me a minute.”

“Well,” John said, scanning the planet below, “the Expedition hasn’t arrived yet. Or at least it’s only their first day here if they have. Atlantis is still submerged. And the Ancients aren’t still here or the system would be filled with Wraith ships and we’d have been shot down immediately like Old Elizabeth said the time ship was. So at least I won’t die again like that time. So, somewhere between a little under ten thousand years ago and eight years ago. Hopefully closer to the latter than the former.”

Rodney sighed. “The stellar drift is nowhere near as drastic as to put us thousands of years back. I need access to Atlantis’ systems and scanning to be more precise but by these calculations and comparing it to the onboard data, the Expedition won’t arrive for another forty to sixty years.”

==

The jumper sped easily through the water and as per Rodney’s prediction, the shield around the submerged city interacted with the smaller ship’s shield and let them through. Rodney’s hands tapped on his tablet but the screen never changed its display as John maneuvered the jumper to the main shuttle bay in the main tower. The roof slid open and the jumper lowered down past the others until it was on the floor.

Rodney maneuvered to the rear compartment and began to disconnect the Zero 

Point Module jury-rigged to the puddle jumper’s power system. John prepared the padded box they used to transport the crystalline power source and waited. Within less than eight minutes, Rodney finished his procedure and unhooked the last wire and placed the ZedPM in the box that John was holding.

“You sure about this, McKay?”

Rodney nodded emphatically. “We’ll be fine. First off, we’re decades earlier than the Expedition which means decades more power in the current ZedPM. Second, there’s only the two of us and we know exactly where to go and how to get there most efficiently, unlike the dozens of people eight years ago decades in the future who just wandered randomly around and started lots of systems. Third, opening the roof hatch to land the puddle jumper takes up significantly less power than even an  _ incoming  _ wormhole does. We take this baby down to the power room with no detours and replace one of the dead ones. Even after we collapsed the rift and sped through it, this still is over eighty-seven percent full. We’ll stabilize the shield for now and have time to plan.”

John frowned. “Right. Plan for the next four to six decades.”

Rodney rolled his eyes as they began walking down the steps and lights began coming on along their path and turning off behind them. “Yes. You need to stop this pessimist thing you’ve got going on. I’m the one who’s supposed to be gloomy and worst case scenario-ing and you cheer me up and get me to calm down and look on the bright side. This will go horrendously badly if we’re both pessimists and grumpy assholes. And I am not good at being the optimist. My brain just doesn’t work that way. I can hope for the best all I want but my brain insists on showing me ways it all will go wrong and we die in horrific ways. And everyone who has ever met me describes me as an asshole. Even you. And I know you can be an asshole but for you, there’s a time and a place and a certain audience. I’m just an asshole all the time. It’s my default setting. 

“So, you need to start seeing the half-full glass. I mean, we collapsed the rift and saved Atlantis and lived through it, which we didn’t think we would, it was a classic John Shepard suicide run, though granted our ending up back in time makes it kind of moot unless we started a loop but even then the survivors will continue forward and live while we go in, collapse it, and end up here only to do it again in eight years, plus decades. But I don’t think that will happen because just being here will change things. Unless we’re really stupid, or unlucky, there is no way we can drain this ZedPM in under a century. So, when the Expedition arrives, it won’t be to a nearly dead power source. Which would change things and may-“

“Rodney! Fine. I don’t really think I’m an optimist but I agree,  _ you  _ are  _ definitely  _ a pessimist. And based on our previous time travel experiences, both first hand and second or third hand, I think we either started a new timeline or just erased our previous one. Paradoxes don’t really seem to exist unless you force them to and we know from my trip to the distant future that we can change the past.”

Rodney nodded. “Right. Like Michael didn’t win because I spent my life making a plan and a hologram to save your ass so you could kick his ass.”

John smiled, “Uh huh. So, we need to figure this out. How much are we gonna change? Beyond the ZPM?”

Rodney walked into the power room and approached the coupler that held the ZedPMs. He examined it and pressed a button which raised a dark one above the unit. He took it out of its slot and removed the new one from the padded box. He slid it into place and lowered it, then began to work with the power system flow. Rodney tilted his head and bit his lip as he backed away from the console.

“Um, I think the first thing we should do is check on Old Elizabeth.”

John squinted at Rodney. “You think she’s waking up? Or do you think we should wake her?”

Rodney nodded, then shook his head. “No. No. A few decades won’t make a real difference to her after nearly ten thousand years. She’d die within a few days. And we don’t have the medical supplies to stabilize her or make her comfortable, not to mention neither of us has more than field medical training. But when the Expedition arrived, she started to be auto defrosted. I stopped it then - which nearly killed her - because I didn’t know what was happening and it was a power drain. But somehow I don’t think it’s going to be an issue.”

John nodded as they moved out to the hallway, making for the nearest transporter. “Right. We’ve got plenty of power to keep her in stasis until the Expedition arrives.”

Rodney frowned as he pressed the dot on the map. “Yeah, plenty of power. This system doesn’t use much. But that isn’t what I meant.”

Rodney stopped talking as they walked the hallways to the stasis room no matter how much John goaded him. As they stood outside the door that held the chamber, Rodney closed his eyes and took a deep breath. John looked at him sideways as he pressed the door lock and it slid open. The two men entered the room and John’s eyes widened at what they saw. Or to be more specific, at what they didn’t see.

John turned to Rodney and whisper-yelled at him. “I thought you said we were in our dimension, McKay.”

“We are.”

John pointed at the empty stasis chamber. “Then where is Elizabeth?”

Rodney approached the console on the wall. “According to this, the stasis chamber was in use from shortly after the city was abandoned until it went offline a few hours ago. It went offline because it read that the pod did not have a body in it.”

Rodney looked at his tablet. “Comparing our rift readings to the stasis pod readings, her body vanished at the  _ exact  _ moment we exited the rift and it collapsed behind us. Our arrival changed the timeline so that the Expedition would never have power issues so John and Elizabeth would never be in the time ship and travel back. I wanted to check on Old Elizabeth because the power room was already using the three ZedPMs in parallel, not one at a time. But the readings showed that it hadn’t been that way for more than a few hours. Our arrival changed the present, not the past.”

John frowned in thought. “So, Elizabeth went back in time to before the Ancients abandoned the city, like before, and Janus helped her and put in the failsafe and changed how the ZPMs work and instructed her how to use the stasis unit to wake to rotate them, like she told us, and then when we exited the rift, those changes, her body, the ZPM power settings, and presumably, Janus’ failsafe to raise the city, reset to how they would have been had she never time travelled?”

Rodney nodded. “Seemingly. Yes. Which could mean that Janus’ time ship is up in the jumper bay as it would have been for her to find it, not destroyed, but maybe not. But then again, the ZedPM settings changed, so it is a possibility to check later.”

John groaned. “It doesn’t make any sense! I could understand if everything had just not happened with her time travel but it did, she was here, Janus changed the power settings before he left the city, and it was all undone magically when we arrived?”

Rodney sneered. “Not  _ magically _ . It is scientific, we just don’t understand the science. The rift, I told you all before we came up with the plan to collapse it, that it was giving off more bands of radiation than just the deadly ones that were killing the city. Bands we had never seen, or ones that we didn’t think could occur at the same time without canceling each other out. I hate to admit it but I have no idea how the rift traveled us in time. It shouldn’t have by what I know. I would have bet on crossing dimensions or planes of existence, even ending up at another Ancient city, since the rift was locked on Atlantis’ structure. Even landing in Atlantis’ original planet, I’d have understood. But this time travel, the rift wasn’t a wormhole, I didn’t even think it was more than a rip in space until we entered it and found the tunnel. We just don’t have the scientific knowledge to comprehend what the hell it was or why it acted the way it did. Possibly, it  _ always  _ connected these two times. Or possibly it ended up with us here because of the fact we collapsed it  _ artificially  _ and how we did it, or just the fact that it collapsed  _ before  _ discharging all of its radiation first. I just - I don’t know. 

“The weird anomalies with Old Elizabeth’s disappearance are odd but I can’t explain them, other than to tell you what the computer records say. It could have something to do with the ascended or not. It could be due to the rift or its collapse, or not. We don’t have the data to know one way or another. We likely never will. Which I hate! But right now we have other things we need to focus on. A large one being the fact that Janus’ failsafe is probably no longer there.”

John put his hand on Rodney’s shoulder. “We just put a nearly fully charged ZPM in the power room. It’ll last a long time.”

Rodney nodded and slumped against the hand on his shoulder. “Yes. But we’re still underwater, the shield is there, it’s a big power drain. It won’t be a huge issue for us but I  _ would  _ still like to have a failsafe in place or possibly raise the city deliberately.”

“And if the Wraith stop by? And we’re on the surface?”

“We’ll have shields. And I can rig the city to cloak and shield at the same time.”

“Alright, we need to figure out what we’re going to do, Rodney. Let’s eat and talk.”

==

Rodney and John sat on the floor of the jumper bay on a blanket, John leaning back against the small ship while Rodney leaned against a pillar. The remains of their meal were piled between them. John tilted his head as he looked at them. “One thing we need to do is figure out what we can trade for fresh food and seed stock. We packed the jumper with a month’s worth of MREs for both of us, plus three days worth of fresh food but after that, we’re out of luck.”

Rodney nodded. “We know some settlements we can trade at. And we know that the salt and minerals from Atlantis’ water filtration system are highly valued. We’ll skip the nuclear Genii but the Athosians are a possibility, or the Hoffans. And we can always take the jumper to the mainland and hunt or fish. And see what grows wild there. I know Teyla said there were things that did that we would recognize from our trading.”

“We could set up crops on the mainland, ones that don’t require lots of looking after.”

Rodney tilted his head. “Maybe. I think we should get hydroponics up and running and a garden or two out on the balconies. It’s just going to be the two of us for  _ decades _ , John. We  _ can’t  _ bring anyone here, to Atlantis or even to the planet. It’s just too dangerous when we’re the only backup.”

John sighed. “Yeah. I know. We shouldn’t even mention Atlantis, the Ancients/Ancestors, or Earth. We’ll pose as traders from, hmm, uh-“

“Tau’ri.”

“Okay. Yeah. And that way when the Expedition arrives, they won’t have to adjust. They'll be used to that term for them on other planets. Unless we fix that.”

Rodney shook his head. “No. I  _ get it _ , John. There’s lots of things I’d like to change, in the program  _ and  _ outside of it. And if we had time traveled to Earth or even somewhere in the Milky Way, I would seriously consider it. But we’re in another galaxy. 

“I double checked my readings from the jumper against Atlantis’. It is currently 1951 on Earth. The Stargate isn’t even currently under Cheyenne Mountain. The Cold War is well underway and the gate room is a working missile silo, SG1 found that out when they time traveled to 1969. It’s still 12 years until Neil Armstrong walks on the  _ moon _ , let alone anyone visiting another planet. Unless you count Ernest Littlefield who is already on the meeting place planet and has been for around 6 years. And even if we waited until the gate was active in 1997 - which is 46 years from now, by the way - they wouldn’t recognize our DHD codes - or  _ us _ by then. We are stuck here, in Pegasus, until the Expedition arrives in 53 years. Assuming we can stay alive until then.”

John frowned for a minute, then nodded in acceptance. “Fine. I know. I just hoped - anyway, so we need to trade for food and eventually medical supplies. We have a basic field medical kit in the jumper and a bit more. We won’t have any backup in the field or on the city. So, we need an alpha site, at least to use as a waystation to keep Atlantis’ address a secret. Probably several of them.”

“Also, we won’t have anyone here to lower the shield so we’ll need to figure something out with that.”

“Could we get a secondary gate and either set it up on the mainland or in orbit?”

Rodney furrowed his brow in thought. “Not on the mainland. Maybe set one up an hour out from the planet by jumper, in an orbit around the sun, but in the same plane as this planet. I’ll work on it. Just, until then, one of us should stay on the city. And we don’t take the jumper to anywhere with a  _ hint  _ of either Wraith  _ or  _ humans.”

“Agreed. So, we agreed we can’t change anything back on Earth, at least until they come to Pegasus. But can we change things here  _ in _ Pegasus?”

Rodney smiled. “Some, yes. But we have to be  _ very  _ careful about the Wraith. They  _ cannot  _ know about Earth or the Milky Way. Five decades is too long, they’d be able to find it by then if they had the smallest clue. But we may be able to help some.”

“Sateda?”

Rodney nodded. “Sateda. I don’t think we can really prevent it’s culling, not with just us, but we may be able to give them a better chance to get their people off world, or at least more of their people. And hopefully, keep Ronon from becoming a Runner.”

“It’ll be tricky, Rodney.”

“I know.  But we have decades to figure it out and drop clues and hints. First thing, though, we need more ZedPMs.”

“The lament of Atlantis.”

“Funny. But we know where several are that we had - problems with before. Like, you can go to the Brotherhood planet and take theirs without them even knowing you were there. And there’s the one on Dragon world.”

“They weren’t dragons, McKay. If it doesn’t breathe fire, you cannot call it a dragon, no matter how big a lizard it is.”

“Whatever. That facility had three ZedPMs and we only retrieved  _ one  _ two years ago in our timeline, after we got Atlantis back to Pegasus. Plus there was the one -“

“I know, Rodney. I know. We’ll stock up on ZPMs. And trade for food and stuff. And find a gate to use for your plan. And pick empty worlds for waystations.”

“And input a failsafe, a combo shield cloak, and then raise the city. And stay away from the Wraith. Period.”

“And explore the city, with care. And destroy some of the more fucked up experiments the Ancients did.”

“Like the exploding tumor machine and the energy-sucking creature and the nanite plague.”

John nodded, “And the ascension machine.”

Rodney nodded. “And the ascension machine. Plus I’ll have lots of time to dig into the computer, work on the database and my own projects.”

“Fifty-three years. Just us for fifty-three years.”

“Yes, yes, fifty-three years until the Expedition arrives.”

“You and me, making Pegasus better. McShep for the win!”


End file.
